Great Porter Square: A Mystery. v. 2

by B. L. Farjeon

But Adolph served me in more ways than one, and in a way neither he nor I could have dreamt of. The money-lender he recommended me to go to lived in the City, and to reach his office I had to pass my father’s place of business. I drove there in a four-wheeled cab, and to avoid notice I kept the windows up. But as I passed my father’s City house I could not help looking towards it, and I was surprised to find it closed. My own name did not appear upon the bill, and the money-lender and I were strangers to each other. I did not hesitate, therefore, when our business was concluded, to inquire if he knew Mr. Holdfast, and he replied that the name was well-known in the City. I then inquired why his place of business was closed, and received, in answer, the unexpected information that my father was in America, and had been there for many months. Upon this, I said in a careless tone, as though it were a matter in which I was but slightly interested, that I had heard that Mr. Holdfast had returned from America two or three months ago.

“Oh, no,” was the reply; “Mr. Holdfast had not yet come back.”

This set me thinking, and added another link to the mystery and sorrow of my life. I determined to assure myself whether my father was really in London, and on the following day I sent to his house, by a confidential messenger, an envelope. It was simply a test of the money-lender’s statement. The messenger returned to me with the envelope unopened, and with the information that my father was in America. “I inquired of the workpeople,” said my messenger, “and was told that Mr. Holdfast had not been seen in the neighbourhood for quite half a year.”

What conclusion was I to draw from this startling disclosure? My father, returning to England in the Germanic, had never been heard of either at his house of business or at his home? What, then, had become of him? What motive had he for mysterious concealment? Arguing, as I believed to be the case when I received the first letter from him in New York, that he had discovered the infamous character of the woman he had made his wife, there was perhaps a motive for his not living in the house to which he had brought her; but it was surely reasonable to expect that his return would be known at his place of business. I reflected upon the nature and character of my father’s wife, and upon the character of her scheming lover, Mr. Pelham; I subjected them to a mental analysis of the most searching kind, and I could arrive at but one conclusion—Foul Play! Judging from what had occurred between them and my poor friend, Sydney Campbell, there was no plot too treacherous for them to engage in, no scheme too wicked for them to devise and carry out. Foul Play rose before me in a thousand hideous shapes, until in its many-sided mental guise it became a conviction so strong that I did not pause to doubt it. Then arose another phase of the affair. If there had been Foul Play with my father, was it not reasonable to suppose that I, also, had been made the victim of clever tricksters? This, too, in a vague inexplicable way, became a conviction. A number of conflicting circumstances at once occurred to me in confirmation. The advertisement in the New York Herald desiring me to proceed to Chicago attached itself to the statement of the manager of the hotel at which my father stopped that Mr. Holdfast had not been in Chicago. The second advertisement in the “Personal” column of the Herald desiring me to advertise the name of the ship I took passage in from New York to Liverpool, attached itself to the circumstance that my father’s letter, handed to me by the hotel manager, contained no wish to know what ship I sailed in. And upon this came the thought that at the time this last “Personal,” which I supposed was inserted by my father, appeared in the columns of the Herald, my father was on the Atlantic. Fool that I was to act without deliberation, to believe without questioning. Last of all, the conflicting tone of the two letters I received from my father, the one in New York, which was undoubtedly genuine, and the one from the Liverpool post office, which may have been forged!—This completed it. Conviction seemed added to conviction, confirmation to confirmation, doubt to doubt—although every point in the evidence was circumstantial, and, nothing as yet could be distinctly proved. How I regretted that I had not kept the letters! When I received the last in Liverpool, I tore up, in a fury of indignation, every letter my father had written to me, and had therefore no writing of his in my possession by which I could compare and judge. I find now, that it is too late, that there is no wisdom in haste.

It weighed heavily upon me, as a duty not to be avoided, to endeavour to ascertain whether my father arrived in the Germanic, and after that what had become of him. And with the consciousness of this unmistakable duty arose the memory of so many acts of tenderness and kindness from my father to myself, that I began to accuse myself of injustice towards him, and to believe that it was not he who had wronged me, but I who had wronged him. With this grievous thought in my mind, I left you, and proceeded to Liverpool.

My first visit was paid to the office of the White Star Line. There I learned that my father had taken passage in New York on the date I gave, that the Germanic arrived in Liverpool after a rapid passage of little more than eight days, that no casualty occurred on the voyage, and that there was no doubt that my father landed with the other passengers. This point was settled by the books of the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool. My father had stopped there for six days, and his name was duly recorded. Another point, quite as important, was established by reference to the hotel books and by inquiring of persons employed in the hotel. When my father left Liverpool, he took train to London. I had arrived at this stage of my inquiries, and was debating on the next step to take, when my attention was attracted by the cries of the newspaper street boys, calling out at the top of their voices, fresh discoveries in the Evening Moon respecting the murder in Great Porter Square. With no suspicion of the awful disclosure which awaited me, but naturally interested in any new phase of the mysterious incident, I purchased the paper and looked at the headings of the Supplement, and, casually at the matter. Seeing my own name—the name of Holdfast—repeated over and over again in the paper, I hurried from the street to the solitude of my room, and there read the most wicked, monstrous, and lying romance that human minds ever invented. And in addition to the horrible calumnies which that “Romance of Real Life” contains in its references to me, I learned, to my unutterable grief, that the man who was so foully murdered in Great Porter Square was my own father.

My dear, for many minutes the terrible disclosure—the knowledge that my dear father had met his death in a manner so awful and mysterious, took such complete possession of my mind that I had no thought of myself. My father was dead! The last time we met we parted in anger, using words to each other such as bitter enemies would use. I swore in his presence that he was dishonouring the name of Holdfast, and that I would never use it until he asked my forgiveness for the cruel injustice he had done me; and he drove me from his heart and from his house. My forgiveness he could never ask for now; he was dead! And the wrong we each did to the other in that hot encounter, in which love was poisoned by a treacherous wanton’s scheming, could never be repaired until we met in another world. I wept bitter tears, and falling on my knees—my mind enlightened by the strange utterances of a worthless woman, as reported in the Evening Moon—I asked my father’s forgiveness, as I had warned him to ask mine. And yet, my dear, neither of us was wrong; he was right and I was right; and if the question between us were put to a high and worthy test, it would be found that we both were animated by impulses which, under other circumstances, would have been an honour to our manhood.

But these kindly feelings passed away in the indignation which a sense of monstrous injustice inspired. To see my name so blackened, so defamed, my character so outraged and malformed, inflamed me for a time to a pitch of fury which threatened to cloud my judgment and my reason. What brought me to my senses? My love for you. I should have been reckless had I only myself to protect, to provide for; but a dearer self than myself depended upon me, and my honour was engaged to you. It was due to you that I should clear myself of these charges. Herein, my dear, came home to me, in the most forcible manner in which it could have been presented, the value of responsibilities. They tend to check our selfish impulses, and to indicate to us our line of action—straight on.

At this time I had written to you my half-disapproval of the step you had taken in disguising yourself as a maid-of-all-work, and obtaining a situation next to that in Great Porter Square in which the murder had been committed—Great God! I cannot write it with calmness—the murder of my father. But after I had read the Romance in Real Life in the Evening Moon and had somewhat calmed myself, I seemed to see in your action a kind of Providence. Before these insanely-wicked inventions of my father’s widow were made public, before it was known that the man who was murdered in Great Porter Square was my father, it was comparatively unimportant that I should be cleared of a charge of which I was innocent; it was then, so to speak, a side issue; now it is a vital issue. And the murderer must be discovered. I say it solemnly—must be discovered! He will be. Not by the Government, nor by the police, nor by any judicial agency, but by one whose honour, whose future, whose faith and love, are dragged into this dread crisis. And I see that it will be so—I see that you have been guided by a higher than a human impulse in your love-directed and seemingly mad inspiration to transform and degrade yourself, for the purpose of clearing me from a wicked and cruel accusation. At one time I doubted whether truth and justice were more than words; I doubt no longer; reflecting over certain incidents and accidents—accidents as I believed them to be—I see that something more than chance directed them, and that of our own destinies we ourselves are not the sole arbiters.

In the extraordinary narration presented to the readers of the Evening Moon I read that I am dead. Well, be it so. How the falsehood was invented, and led up to, and strengthened by newspaper evidence, scarcely interests me in the light of the more momentous issue which affects my future and yours. Involved in it, undoubtedly, were wonderful inventive powers, much painstaking, and immense industry—the result of which was a newspaper paragraph of a few lines, every word of which is false. That the woman who was my father’s wife, that the man who is her lover, believe that I am dead, appears to be beyond doubt. Let them continue in their belief until their guilt is brought home to them. To all intents and purposes, to all useful ends at present in the service of truth and justice, it will be best that it should be believed that I am dead. So let it be, then, until the proper time comes. It will come, I believe and hope.